Category: Uncategorized

A Different Kind of Power

At the end of her memoir, Jacinda Ardern imagines giving advice to a young girl who doubts herself.

The things you thought would cripple you will in fact make you stronger, make you better. They will give you a different kind of power, and make you a leader that this world, with all its turmoil, might just need (pp131-132).

It was hard to put this book down (in more ways than one). It answered a lot of questions I had about what it was like being Prime Minister, a sensitive, principled, idealistic and female one particularly. No ghost writer was involved here, but surely a good editor. It is very well written and well structured; parts of it echo and link, particularly character-forming moments from early in her life which serve her well when making hard decisions later. It goes well beside Michelle Duff’s biography, which gives the political and social context more than it gives details about her life.

I looked through my 2020 diary to find mention of Ardern’s government and the covid response and was shocked to find there was very little. And yet it occupied our daily lives and our thinking in all her years in government. My journal did a better job, thankfully, and I had slipped newspaper cuttings into it which are interesting to read now. Something else in my journal caught my eye. In November 2021 I was reading Deborah Levy’s first memoir Things I Don’t Want to Know and had copied down this extract where it occurs to her that like other women she is ‘on the run’.

We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life…The way we laugh. At our own desires. The way we mock ourselves. Before anyone else can. The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves. It doesn’t bear thinking about (pp158-9).

I remembered Ardern writing in the memoir that she was ‘on the run’ from one thing to another in her life. She discusses with a friend their shared tendency to ‘run away’ from things. The honesty of her self-evaluation is an admirable aspect of the book. When she decides to leave Helen Clark’s office and go to New York she worries that she could not be sensitive and survive in politics.

Was I running away? Probably. But that was better than staying and facing up to the fact that I couldn’t do something (p122).

In the Acknowledgements, Jacinda Ardern thanks her mother for going through ‘endless journals’ for her. Clearly, the family kept better diaries than I, and it explains the careful details of Ardern’s early years and highlights the collaborative spirit of her family who have supported her and her own family consistently.

It seems like a completely different time we lived through during Ardern’s two terms as Prime Minister – certainly a contrast to the current government. An article I found tucked into my journal describes the change as ‘Retrograd’.

People whose outlay involves enormous houses, multiple properties, private schools and expensive cars will demand tax and rates cuts, while furiously complaining about public services…Mention you’ve waited hours for an ambulance, or that mental health services are stretched to the limit, and they’ll be indignant. They will blame the government. Then they will briskly use the tax cut to transport the family to a holiday in Europe. This is Retrograd, where you take it all for yourself, live your best gated life, enjoy the paradise of your own scorched earth.

-Charlotte Grimshaw, Listener, 26 March 2022

A Different Kind of Power gives me some hope that these days won’t last – before climate change beats us to it.

For Felix fans

Felix has been caught on camera a few times recently.

He often rides on the tray of Mum’s walker.

A couple of times he’s put an end, literally, to Mum’s knitting. He recently wrecked a raffia placemat. Before long, he and Mum are friends again.

Here he is watching the All Blacks v France game on Saturday:

And, tonight, relaxing by the fire:

Ta-da! Jigsaw completed

Jigsaws can be frustrating and annoying sometimes, especially if there are huge areas of one colour. This one was a delight. It’s The World of Miss Marple – one of ‘The World of…’ series. Last winter I completed The World of Jane Austen. I have The World of Charles Dickens and The World of Shakespeare yet to do, but at this point I’ve resolved to do just one each winter. Fun though it was, I became a bit obsessed and all other plans were swept aside. I develop ‘jigsaw eyes’ too; seeing details of buildings or gardens as if I’m looking at a jigsaw.

Saturday. What’s this about, then?
I completed characters before I had all the edge pieces
Wednesday. Being reminded to pay attention to Felix.
This morning
Done by lunch time

The World of… series comes with a poster of the finished jigsaw and, on the reverse, the characters are explained and which book they appear in. This Miss Marple jigsaw also listed the clues dotted about the puzzle, the books they occur in and the publication dates. They are jigsaws to keep and to treasure.

My Jane Austen shelf, with jigsaw

Welcoming (most) wildlife into your garden

Should you be selective about what forages in your garden? Once you open the gate to wildlife there’s no stopping them. I have a bug house which is smothered in spider webs. Two bird feeders attract lots of waxeyes and a few sparrows. The blackbirds seem to fend for themselves, digging into the leaf litter for snails, worms and insects (and they enjoy the birdbath), and finches occasionally fly in to feed on the seeds of plants such as borage which also attracts bees when flowering. Fantails flit high up in the canopy, catching insects on the wing. Other birds pass overhead: spur-winged plovers, gliding seagulls and sometimes a pair of ducks or a skein of geese. Sometimes I hear a grey warbler and distant magpies.

On the flip side, cats cruise through (discouraged by a water gun if I’m fast enough), Felix brings in a rat now and again, and ants appear with monotonous regularity. Two days ago I was horrified to find thick masses of ants around the guttering downpipes and long lines of them along the eaves and walls of the house. I should have taken photos to freak you out, but I had turned into a rubber-gloved, masked avenger with a loaded spray gun before it occurred to me to record the event. The next day there was little sign of ants – except along the clothes line where a column of them was migrating to a nearby tree, like Mother Courage and her children toiling across the battlefield. It seems I only feel sorry for them when they are in retreat.

There are several natural sources of bird food: apples, berries, aphids, and abutilon, camelia and protea flowers.

Apple tree
Abutilon flowers

And there are two bird feeders:

The new bird feeder (on the left) requires sugar water and ‘truffles’. Lately, I’ve been replacing the truffles every day for these voracious (hungry?) waxeyes. So that nothing is wasted, I put the little bits which fall through the wire feeder into the other bird feeder, with the windfall apples. I worry that I should leave a gap before replacing the truffles (a day? half a day?) so that the birds don’t become too dependent on them.

Both bird feeders are cat proof. For Felix, the new bird feeder is cat television. He sits in the parsley under the cranberry bush and watches for hours – even now, in the rain.

A photo taken several days ago. Felix briefly switched his attention to me.

Cold start

It was a chilly start to the day: minus three degrees. A bird bath, overflowing from recent rain, was frozen solid. It looks as if my lettuces have succumbed to the cold, while the proteas are doing just fine outside. I put them outside the back door when I discovered ants in the flowers. These ones were cut down by the arborist last week and I rescued them before they could be put through the mulcher. I guess the ants were attracted to their nectar while they were down on the ground. I saw proteas for sale at $3.99 per stem this week – even without bonus ants.

By the time I ventured outside, it was one degree, and cream on porridge and in coffee seemed like a good idea. A bit cloying, it turned out; easily fixed by a drink of water and cleaned teeth. Meantime, wax eyes could be seen at the bird feeder through a window misty with condensation. Felix chose to stay in bed.

The beach was beautiful – clear, blue, with a flat sea and ships on the horizon waiting to go into the harbour. We were warmed by the sun, by our thermos tea, and by the sight of two horses.

By late afternoon, Felix was enjoying the last of the sun. I lit the fire. We’re due for similar temperatures tonight.

Resident rat?

This morning, Felix showed an interest in the old kitchen fireplace where I keep a wicker hamper for his cat food. Uh-oh, I thought, that would be an ideal place for the rat to hide – close to the cat food and water bowl. It could live there.

Later in the morning, Mum looked up from the newspaper and exclaimed that the rat was on the back of the sofa. It quickly darted out of sight. ‘Cute little thing,’ said Mum, ‘with beady little eyes.’

After a while she saw it going under the dining table. That’s near the door onto the deck, so I opened it wide, hoping the rat would answer the call of the wild in preference to 5-star domestication.

We haven’t seen it since. The only evidence (possibly) of its presence is the bite marks on one of the windfall apples on the table. As a rule I put the windfalls which are partly eaten by birds on the bird feeder. It seems unlikely that I missed bites so obvious. Does this indicate that he has taken up residence? My sense is that he took the chance and went outside. Here’s hoping.

Where’s the rat?

Felix, you rat-catcher. I’ll have one of your nine lives.

-Shakespeare, paraphrased by me.

At about 5.15am I was woken by a kerfuffle. Felix had already had his breakfast at 4am, so it couldn’t be him dropping hints. Something skittered across my bedhead. Felix walks across the bedhead, knocking things down as he goes, he doesn’t skitter. I reached for the light and there was Felix with a rat in his mouth.

I had heard a rat gnawing at something in the roof space during the night. I hoped it was the blocks of rat bait it (they?) was chowing down on and not the wiring. Trees around the guttering had been cut back, but maybe not far enough; I’ve heard rats can jump quite a distance. The cold weather would be driving them inside. There had been signs of rats in the woodpile. Felix was on their trail.

After watching the chase from my bed with one French door open (Felix carried the rat outside, but came back in before I could close the door) I managed to shut them out of the bedrooms and hallway and went back to bed. In the morning, Felix was asleep on a chair in the sitting room. No sign of the rat…but there was some disarray in my study. With a sinking heart, I realised it was probably behind something. I resolved to get ready for the day as usual: shower, exercises, breakfast, chores, before investigating further. I dressed in trousers which were snug at the ankle.

When Mum reported that a rat had been under her chair before running into my study, I fetched my head torch, brush and pan, and donned gardening gloves. Then I began to pull out the shelf and drawer units from under the desk. The rat appeared – each of us recoiling in horror – and disappeared. I fetched Felix (sleeping on Mum’s bed by this time) and set him to the task. There was chasing and to-and-fro, and then nothing. Felix got bored and wandered off.

I eventually cleaned out under my desk – finding only a long-legged spider – and put everything back. I summoned the courage to put my feet under my desk to write this post.

But where is it?

Gambling with the weather

‘No, thank you. I don’t approve of gambling,’ Mum would say if someone tried to sell her a raffle ticket. But we do gamble everyday, whether we realise it or not. Setting out on my bike. Crossing the street. Making an observation to someone. Putting out the laundry when winter is beginning to bite.

Today, I gambled with the weather. Despite trying to change my washing day after I retired, I’ve fallen back onto the old routine of Saturday morning washing and rarely shift from that unless the weather’s really bad. Mum’s washing day is Monday – I think that’s traditional, when you’d heat up the copper and use huge sticks to stir the washing around before rinsing it and putting it through a mangle and heaving it onto the line, hoisted up with a clothes prop.

An Aside: Mum remembers that in my grandparents’ farm kitchen there was a clothes airer which was hauled up by a cord towards the ceiling where the washing would get the heat from the coal range. My grandmother would flick the long cord at Mum’s brothers if they misbehaved at the table. I can picture them gambling with their mother’s patience.

The Met Service app advised against doing laundry today. But it was a breezy day with the odd bit of blue sky, so I took a gamble. Out went three lots of laundry.

It rained…
Then, the sun came out

Finally, about 4pm, I brought the washing in. At that point there was a good breeze and the sun was shining, but it was drizzling at the same time. The towels went into the dryer to finish off, but the rest was dry enough to put on the clothes airer inside. So, I figure I broke even.

Seventy

If I say it often enough, I may begin to believe it. It’s more than a week since the significant milestone and I’m begin to get used to the idea – although it still surprises me. And I’m lucky. Two close friends didn’t make it to 60. Dad was only 62.

When my brother turned 70 he just wanted to hide away – no celebration, thank you! I was happy to celebrate. My younger brother and sister-in-law took me out to lunch on the day, friends and I went out for lunch two days after, and my sister and brother-in-law hosted a family dinner in the weekend.

‘Dark and Stormy’ cocktail at lunch
Sweet Soul dessert shared with Mum
by Ruth
Lovely cards (even the two shouting ’70’) and, appropriately, Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages’ on the wall behind

It’s nice to stretch out a celebration over several days.

The huge cake had to be steadied for cutting
Nephew with great-nephews
Everyone and their dog were there (and one cat – the other was in hiding)

After the party, there were flowers (and chocolates) to enjoy, a bird feeder perfectly timed for winter, some wise advice, and a delightful photo from my niece of the two great-nephews sleeping on the journey home after the long weekend (King’s Birthday). And is this a good spot to plant the tree?

Nashi Pear tree
Watched over by Charlie Dog

Back in the garden

It’s great to be back working in the garden after a ‘gardening drought’. Once I got started, I was encouraged by my progress and have been gardening for several days. Tidying around the edges came first and led to more deadheading and cutting back the raspberry canes. I mulched the berry patch with leaves from the cherry tree.

The vegetable garden required more thought. I want to rotate the vegetables, but it’s difficult when I have no success with some things. I drew up a plan and made a to-do list, then researched the prices of vegetables packs and bark for the paths. I bought the plants at a favourite nursery (Oderings) – and added a Pink Princess daphne plant to my trolley as well. I prepared the beds and planted most of the vegetables (broad beans, and onions) until I ran out of daylight around 5pm – so frustrating, but time for cheese and crackers and gin and tonic.

Today I went to Mitre 10 for bark – and bought some pea straw and thyme plants. (I recycle used plastic plant pots here too.) I planted the remaining vegetables (rainbow chard and curly kale). The daphne required a bit more care according to my research. I measured the soil ph/acid levels, dug the hole wide but not too deep, put bark mulch in the hole to aid drainage, and added sheep pellets and a bit of acid fertiliser. The daphne looked a little sad in the nursery I thought, but it was the last they had of the variety I had seen recommended in an article. I hope she cheers up!

Pink Princess

I bought three varieties of thyme (lemon, golden and common) and put them in terracotta pots to go alongside the stepping stones which I’ve put through the centre of the vegetable patch. I’ve widened the garden by moving the brick edging further into the lawn. It felt creative, deciding to add some stones here, bark mulch there, and some old boards as edging. Pea straw around the chard and kale added the rustic look I like – and it smells wonderful!